Blackett Family Connections to Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom

Including Sir Robert Walpole, generally accepted as being (de facto) the first Prime Minister of Great Britain, 52 men and two women have held the office, nearly one quarter of them during the reign of the present Queen. Links, mostly by marriage, to the Blackett family have been discovered to 41 of them, as shown below. Every Prime Minister of the 18th century and all but one (Benjamin Disraeli – see Note) of the 19th can be linked to the Blacketts. Even in the more democratic 20th century Prime Ministers with links to the Blacketts were in office in 52 years.

(Note. In 1852 Disraeli, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, made a lengthy and eloquent speech in the House of Commons on the death of the Duke of Wellington. Edward Algernon Blackett of Wylam discovered that a section of the speech was almost word for word a repetition of an encomium pronounced by M. Thiers on Marshal Gouvion de St. Cyr in 1829 which had been quoted in the Morning Chronicle in 1848. Blackett passed on his discovery to his brother, John Fenwick Burgoyne Blackett MP, who in turn informed The Globe, a newspaper founded by their grandfather in 1803. The Globe commented thus about Disraeli’s plagiarism: “We have seen him snatch a wreath of faded French artificial flowers for the pall of Wellington, with an audacity of larceny unsurpassed in Grub Street.” Paradoxically, however, the public seemed to enjoy the discovery of Disraeli’s plagiarism. As William S. Walsh put it in his “Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities” (1892): “…he gave his critics the pleasure of detecting him – a great delight accorded to a worthy and deserving and very hard-worked class. The whole of England was aroused, amused and interested.”)

Only two Prime Ministers, Arthur James Balfour and Sir Anthony Eden, (see 33 & 43 below) are direct descendants of Blacketts, but the descendants of a number of others also have Blackett ancestry. Some links to the Blacketts are via other Prime Ministers who were related to each other. In addition to the links shown there is a further link to 15 Prime Ministers who were descendants of Sir George Villiers, 3xgreat-grandfather of Lady Barbara Villiers, the second wife of Sir William Blackett. Those Prime Ministers are marked with a *.
(Some of the links are a little tortuous but are included for the sake of completeness and to illustrate the degree of inter-marriage between members of the ruling classes of the day).

PRIMEMINISTERS, PERIOD OF OFFICE, POLITICALPARTYANDLINKS TO BLACKETTS (clicking on the number will take you to their Wikipedia page)